SAP Business One – Accounts Payable Batch Processing

An SAP Business One 9.0 client recently asked how to handle Accounts Payable Batch Processing. Documents can be saved as a Draft and then send an alert to an approver in SAP Business One, to review and batch post to the G/L. This Blog features a discussion how to enable these alerts along with batch processing of A/P Invoices, through the fuse of Queries and Alerts in SAP Business One 9.0.

In reality, an alert can be sent for every type of document (meaning a separate alert for draft A/R Invoices, AP Invoices, Incoming Payments, Outgoing Payments, etc.) or alternatively you can set one alert for all documents types.

A simple example, is presented below that will be for an AP Invoice where every A/P Invoice will be saved as draft by an reviewer and a daily alert will be sent to an approver to have Invoices added to the system as a batch at the end of the day.

In this scenario, the reviewer is an A/P Clerk, who is tasked with the classic three-way matching process of comparing the invoice they’ve received with the original purchase order and the packing slip. From the Purchase Order screen, the reviewer could “Copy to” an Invoice to save time in creating the final document. If these documents all match up, the A/P Clerk would Save As in the Invoice Screen in SAP Business One and save that document as a Draft.

Beforehand, a Query has been created in SAP Business One to identify all the invoices created on today’s date, draw down all the document specific data to be shown in the Query Results on a document who’s status is “O” or Open. This query would also need to be associated to an Alert in SAP Business One, by creating it, assigning the approver(s), and then scheduling it in Administration > Alert Manager.

Once the approver(s) receive this alert, they will have a listing of all open A/P Invoices meeting the Query’s criterion, along with the relevant data like Vendor, Due Date, Document Total, etc., in the Query Results. An approver can work this Query Result Screen, navigating from the Query Result display directly to each document through the use of the “Golden Arrow” beside the Document Number. From there, the approver would save the document as status Closed (C). These closed A/P Invoices are now available to be posted in batch mode, according to your company’s posting / payment schedule.